25 Beautiful Minimalist Designs

"Simplify, simplify, simplify."
It's one of Thoreau's most enduring witticisms, and with good reason. When faced with the ever-increasing barrage of information that is modern life, many people find solace in minimalism. This trend has taken an especially strong hold on the Web.
Minimalism and simplification draw attention to important page elements. Using lots and lots of empty space makes content stand out. The overall effect is calming and sophisticated, a welcome break from the typical gauntlet of advertisements and traffic and television and whatever else screams incessantly for your attention.
For your inspiration, here are 25 beautiful minimalist designs. Some are charming, some powerful, some stunning, but they’re all linked by the same idea: simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.

Miguel Ripoll


26000 Vodka


Weather Flash


FRKT


Cascading Style S--t


The Big Word Project


WordPress AntiVirus


For a Beautiful Web


Have You Flossed Today?


Tajloro


jeromeM


min-style


Delicious Design Studio


Plush Department


Troiani Design


Get and Give


Black Estate


The Unexpected Pit Bull


Go Go Gunner


A Woman in the Mirror


zupadupa


Organic SEO


The How To Stretching Zone


Made By On


Popmatik

Website Design & Development

Website Design, Development, and E-Commerce

With my experience in graphic design, website development, and e-commerce programming, you can be confident that whatever your project demands, I can deliver on time and on budget. View the Web Design Process and request a no cost, no obligation Web Design Quote now!
contact me: diego.benna@gmail.com

Here you can see one of my recent work for the study of landscape architecture, panGea: www.pangeaprogetti.it

Increasing Permgen size in your Web Server

In previous posts , we had talked about Increasing the Heap size of your server

Here will talk about the Permgen space , how it is different from heap size and why just increasing the heap size will not help you in getting rid of this error 

Java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space

The permanent generation should not be ignored, because you need enough memory allocated to it to hold all classes in all of your applications including the JSP’s. So if you have an application which uses a good number of third party libraries , has lot of files , you will definitely need a lot of Permgen space. If you are running two applications on the same server , definitely allocate some good chunk of memory to your Perm gen.

How to increase PermGen?

When you add this line in your catalina.bat or catalina.sh

export JAVA_OPTS=-Xms128m -Xmx192m

It only increase heap size. This is how it would look like (assuming your default PermGen is 64MB)

PermGen does not change

To increase PermGen , it would be

export JAVA_OPTS=-Xms128m -Xmx192m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m

See how the size of PermGen has increased.

Perm Gen increased

This was done on Tomcat 6.0.14

How to increase heap size in Tomcat 6

Most of us who have worked with Apache-Tomcat in productions systems, would have faced out of memory errors sometimes or other.  It is not that it always happens in tomcat but let us look at why does this occur and how to solve it.

 

Understanding Java Virtual Machine 

A Java Virtual Machine on 32-bit operating systems typically has a maximum heap size of 64Mb. The JVM heap space is where all Java objects are stored, as well as memory used by the garbage collector. Sun recommends increasing this value for server applications.

Large server applications often experience two problems with these defaults. One is slow startup, because the initial heap is small and must be resized over many major collections. A more pressing problem is that the default maximum heap size is unreasonably small for most server applications.

64MB  is the heap size in tomcat as well by default and is too less for real world systems. When your application runs and you are able to analyze the app, this is what you would see

heap size in tomcat 

How to increase the heap size?

On windows :

Go to catalina.bat and set this

set JAVA_OPTS=-Xms128m -Xmx192m

On linux :

export CATALINA_OPTS="-Xms16m -Xmx256m";

-Xms – is the minimum or initial size of your heap
-Xmx – is the maximim size

export JAVA_OPTS="-Xms128m -Xmx256m";

On linux , you can also set in setenv.shin the bin folder. The catalina.sh script has logic to call into this script.

Note that CATALINA_OPTS is a better place than JAVA_OPTS. The former is only used when actually starting the Tomcat instance. JAVA_OPTS is also used to start JVMs that only interact with Tomcat (for example the JVM instance that is used to send the shutdown-message to a running Tomcat instance).

You can have a look at this article High Performance in Tomcat. Although this article is pretty old (dates back to Tomcat 4) , it still has lot of good points.
Once you have set the heap , how to check heap size ?

How to check heap size in linux

The output of jmap -heap <pid>.
Some more information can be found here http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/OutOfMemory

Round Web 2.0 Button with a Metal Ring, Glass effect

In this Gimp tutorial we will create a round web 2.0 button/icon with a metal ring around it. This button is very handy for download icons and such, and it can easily be customized, especially with gradients.

FINAL IMAGE PREVIEW

This is what we’re going to create, we will also look at some variations of the button afterwards.

Step 1

Create a new image with a white background. I made mine 600×400.
Now create a new layer and name it “ring”.
Use the Ellipse Select Tool to create a circle that measures 250×250.

Step 2

Set your FG and BG color to a dark gray (333333) and white (ffffff).
Use the Blend Tool to create a gradient from the top of the selection to the bottom of it.
The gradient should be Reversed, the shape set to Radial, the Offset should be set to 20, and Adaptive Supersampling should be enabled.

The offset simply makes it so that we get more white on the top of the button, while Adaptive Supersampling makes it smoother. Our image should look like this now:

Step 3

Shrink the selection by 25px. (Select->Shrink)

Use the Blend Tool to create a gradient from the bottom of the selection to the top of it.
Use the same settings as last time.

Step 4

Create a new layer and name it “sphere”. Shrink the selection by 5px (Select->Shrink), then fill the selection with a blue color (216eda) using the Bucket Fill tool.

Now set your FG color to cyan (4feeff).
Create a radial gradient a little bit above the bottom of the selection and approximately 120px up.
The Gradient should be set to FG to Transparent, it should not be reversed, set the Offset to 20, and make sure Adaptive Supersampling is disabled.

That should give us this result:

Step 5

Set your FG color to white (ffffff). We’re going to use the Paintbrush tool to add a little white at the bottom of the button.
Set the opacity of the brush to 70%, use a large fuzzy brush (Circle Fuzzy 19) and set the scale to 10.
Position the brush so that half of it is inside the selection, then click just once with the mouse.

That should give us a gentle touch of white like this:

Step 6

We’re going to create an inner shadow, to do this we first need to create a new layer and name it “inner shadow”.
Now grow the selection by 1px. Select->Grow.

Then we fill the selection with black (000000) using the Bucket Fill tool.
Next go to Select->Feather.
Feather the selection by 20.

Now hit the Delete button on the keyboard.
Also, we don’t need the selection anymore so get rid of it by going to Select->None.

Next, duplicate the layer so that the inner shadow becomes stronger.

Step 7

Create a new layer and name it “gloss”.
Create a selection where you want the gloss to be.

Set your FG color to white (ffffff).
Create a gradient from the top of the selection to the bottom of it.
The Gradient should be set to FG to Transparent, the Shape to linear, Offset to 0.

Now reduce the opacity of the gloss layer to 75 so that it blends in more smoothly with the rest of the button.

Step 8

Time to add some text, select a font you like and write something on the button, these kinds of buttons are very good for adding short words like GO! or a symbol such as a downwards arrow for a download button.
I simply added the letter Z. The font is Verdana Bold size 100.

Next we give the text an outline.
To do that go to Filters->Light and Shadow->Drop shadow.
Set Offset X and Offset Y to 0.

That should give us a nice dark outline around the text like this:

Step 9

Almost done know, we just need to give the whole button an outline, and soften it a little.
Select the layer named “ring”, and then give it a drop shadow with the same settings as we used on the text.

Now we need to soften the button a little bit just where the inner shadow meets the metal ring.
We have two layers with inner shadow, so we need to merge them into one. In the Layer Dialog, select the top layer with inner shadow, right-click and choose Merge Down.
Next we’re going to give the inner shadow layer a Gaussian blur of 2. (Filters->Blur->Gaussian Blur)

That’s it, the button is done:

Variations

It’s also very easy to make variations of this button by using gradients instead of all that
blue and cyan we made in step 4 and step 5.
Here is the button with the gradient called Deep Sea, the gradient was created
from the bottom of the selection and 450px up.

Here is the same gradient from the top of the selection to almost the bottom of it, and with the gloss shaped differently.

Here it is with the gradient Incandescent from the top of the selection to the bottom of it.

That’s it, it’s the end of the tutorial, tell us what you think in the comments.